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October 03, 2007

A kindly professor has taken pity on me and is mentoring me
through a writing project. In recent
weeks he suggested I read “The Laughing Man,” by J. D. Salinger. I fulfilled my duty in this regard of an
instant, but then I got paranoid. There
is a book, just this one, that I had never read and when anyone found this out
they would freak out on me and press
copies into my hand with the most fervent urgings and intonations. What was I going to do if this professor
wanted to talk to me about The Book?

So at long last I have read The Catcher in the Rye and understand, in more than just a
glimmering kind of way, what people mean when they describe a first-person
narrator as “a female Holden Caufield for the twenty-first century,” though why
people persist in saying this sort of thing is, now more than ever, beyond me.

There is nothing I can tell you about this book that you don’t
already know (excepting, perhaps, that I’m sorry I never returned the copy you
loaned me when you said it would change my life) save this: my three-year old
is being toilet trained and she now refuses to go to the bathroom without being
allowed to “read” The Catcher in the Rye. For real.

October 01, 2007

Ira Glass is the editor of a book called The New Kings of Nonfiction, and I want to read it. You either love him or you hate him and I love him. I'd let the guy program my Tivo. I'd let him marry my old college classmate. Is he too twee? Not for me. [Tip and diverging opinions courtesy of Paper Cuts.]